Turkmenistan rang in the New Year by dramatically devaluing its national currency, the manat, and introducing a steep levy on the price of petrol. The scale of the devaluation – comparable to the 19 percent devaluation of the tenge in Kazakhstan earlier in the year – comes as all Central Asian economies are feeling the

Five years ago, Moscow had every reason to feel secure about its neighborhood. Ally Kazakhstan was settling in as the first post-Soviet state to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Belarus had acquiesced to new oil-supply terms from Russia. And all three countries had just joined forces in a new Common Economic

Making predictions or forecasts about a national or the world economy is fraught with failure. There are so many variables to consider and the data available are often inadequate and biased. But the main reason why economists are usually wrong with their forecasts and predictions is that mainstream economics has no real theory or laws

Since the PKK was established an illegal, armed organization, it has always been revolutionary in the way it obtained its results regardless of a transformation from separate state to democratic autonomy. There was no official alternative to supersede this methodology until the People’s Labor Party (HEP) was brought to life in 1991. Due to the

“As I have said before, our two nations are trying to do something that has never been done in history, which is to write a new answer to the question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet.” Hillary Clinton | Former Secretary of State Power in international relations is explained in

United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), more specifically the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, has recently decided that lavash is an intangible cultural heritage of Armenia or the Armenian nation. Having looked at the popularity and the communality in terms of consumption of lavash – a type of

It might be quite bold to say, but the PKK does not care about anything but the existence of Kurdish cantons in Syria. It cares about this much more than the lives and the future of Kurds. The PKK and its institutional industry have still not taken lessons from the violence that resulted from calling

The Middle East has been persevering not because the leaders of Middle Eastern countries are just and legitimate, but because the people who live there still have hope for the future and ask for a better one. It would be naive to think that the future is going to be shaped by local dynamics and

The last decade has been a golden age in the history of Turkey`s international humanitarian initiatives. Today, Turkey`s humanitarian aid organizations, both state institutions and civil society organizations, operate in over 100 countries worldwide. Thanks to the opportunity spaces created throughout the last decade, by which religious civil society was successfully de-securitized after an almost

The threats posed by Ebola and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) might be perceived as enemies of humanity. One of them is a disease and the other is a terrorist organization. However, both kill people, irritate public opinion, terrify states and spark panic across the world. Outbreak of the Ebola virus Currently,

About two years ago, the current UK finance minister George Osborne commented that ‘hard-working people’ left for work every morning while ‘behind the blinds’ of the house opposite people on benefits were sleeping in. The ‘hard-working’ person was paying for the feckless “to stay at home and not work”. At the time, I wrote a

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, in explaining the rationale behind the presence of multiple institutions in running Turkey’s foreign affairs, articulated that “the multi-faceted foreign policy of Turkey could not be accomplished merely with the traditional foreign policy tools and frameworks.” Having this idea in mind has led to the foundation of new institutions with international

When armed conflict becomes a fact of everyday life, and generations grow up knowing nothing else, imagining life in a state of peace is hard work. The fragile state of Turkey’s negotiations with Kurdish insurgents is testament to that problem. After decades of being torn apart by war, one might assume the people of Turkey

While the U.S.-led global coalition is running a fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, some states carry out a seemingly just, but in reality, a sneaky war against mainstream Islamic circles in domestic politics. ISIS’s aggressive campaigns in Iraq and Syria and cruel killings that went viral

The negligence and the reluctance of the international community to become involved in the Democratic Union Party (PYD) conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in Kobani is now totally explicit. As the PYD states, in case of a sort of genocide of Kurds, the international community would be responsible for it